My Own Private Idaho

Director: Gus Van Sant

1991 / 104min / 35mm

Van Sant’s follow-up to Drugstore Cowboy was another road movie on the skids, the footloose bums this time a narcoleptic queer hustler, Mike (River Phoenix), and the slumming scion of a wealthy family, Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), who takes it upon himself to look after the fragile kid and accompany him on a quest to find the mother who abandoned him… until, that is, the time comes to put aside childish things. A Pacific Northwestern retelling of Shakespeare’s Falstaff-Hal bromance, Idaho was just accessible enough to launch Van Sant into the big leagues, lushly romantic enough to launch many a young viewer into self-discovery, and showed Reeves, occasionally called upon here to declaim in Elizabethan English, capable of expressing depths of feeling only hinted at up until this point in his career.

Distributor: Park Circus